The Gifted Child: Tragedy of U.S. Education

Herschell Podge is a gifted child. He has an IQ of slightly more than 120, an enthusiasm for Shakespeare which survived high school senior English, and, if he's lucky, a handful of muddled aspirations--perhaps to go to college, perhaps, someday, to "change the world" in some small way.

Needy and Needed

Herschell, of course, is a stereotype, one of thousands of America's gifted children turned out of high school incubators with a diploma, a pat on the back, perhaps a tear or two, and three or four years of intellectual stasis behind him. His are the narrow shoulders upon which the nation expects to climb to the moon, to harness atomic energy for peaceful purposes, to solve the questions of sociological change, and to patch up the globular balloon for another generation of battering. He is also our greatest tragedy.

Herschell probably won't get to Harvard, but if he does, he won't be prepared for college work. It will take a composition course like Gen Ed Ahf to teach him how to express himself, and three full-year educational gargantuas--in the humanities and the social and natural sciences--to broaden his horizons enough to allow a certain selectivity in later narrowing them.

Because Herschell doesn't believe that learning is very important. In high school he's discovered that it doesn't take much more than monthly midnight oil to make straight A's, that there would be nobody around to guide him if he decided to do more than the regulations prescribed. "With all the complications of modern civilization," stated a principal of a 2000-student high school, "our primary business is just teaching our boys and girls how to get along with others." And that's what Herschell's high school spent three years doing--teaching him how to get along.

I. The Problems

According to a recent issue of Scientific American, America's high school population numbers among its opinions the following:

Forty percent believe the earth to be the center of the Universe.

Forty-two percent will resist any attempt to change that mystic nebulosity, "the American Way of Life."

Forty-seven per cent think that democracy "depends fundamentally upon the existence of free business enterprise."

Fifty-eight per cent would allow "the third degree" by the police and the F.B.I.

Sixty-per cent sanction book and motion picture censorship by police and "other groups."

We might expect more thoughtful answers from Herschell Podge--a gifted child; most of the students questioned had never given much thought to the matters involved--matters, of course, basic to their modern society. But another national magazine survey revealed that the intelligent student merely refrains from comment on the questions.

Getting Along

Three quarters of America's high school students believe that the most important thing they can learn in school is "how to get along with people." Academic achievement rated first with fourteen per cent. Two thirds of U.S. college students would rather be popular than brilliant, and hold that the main purpose of education is to develop a well-rounded personality.

In secondary education in the United States today the premium is on group acceptance, on conformity and fitting in. "Intellectualism" and the will to learn are inevitably coupled with unpopularity. Herschell Podge failed to realize his potential in high school because he started with three strikes against him.

Life-Adujstment

Primarily there was the philosophy of education trumpeted by the educator quoted above--"life-adjustment." Almost every high school in the nation requires its students to take at least two semesters of diluted kindergarten psychology usually called something like "senior problems." The textbooks, veiled in the blushing sociological jargon of the thirties, hint at sex and domestic problems long since resolved with a good deal more clarity in schoolyards and on lavatory walls. If the high school student hadn't conquered them by his senior year, he was already an irrevocable neurotic.

The Little Things

The senior problems classes are accompanied by a vast menagerie of "special courses" geared to group dynamics and round-edged social intercourse--required courses in home economics (for girls), hygiene (for everyone), a daily period of physical training, and government classes for student leaders elected to campus offices.

As a result of such an overburdened schedule of trivia, over half of U.S. high schools have no foreign language requirement, no science requirement, and no mathematics requirement for graduation. There are no available facilities for advanced study in English literature. Where 75 per cent of our high schools offer typing courses, only 40 per cent have school newspapers appearing as regularly as once a month--and some of those are mimeographed. Advertising, shorthand, auto shop, and a half-term of empirical economics teaching you how to avoid being gypped when you purchase an automobile--these are the trade and social courses which compose the high school academic gamut.

With the spectre of Sputnik darkening their countenances, Congressmen and grim pedagogues have proposed a "crash program" for science in the secondary schools. But the problem is not only science; a New Republic feature article disclosed that three quarters of the students in the South--on into their freshman classes at college--couldn't identify Aaron Burr, Leon Trotsky, Martin Luther, or Aristotle ("one of Christ's disciples," wrote a college freshman). Parents, employers, and college instuctors are discovering that great percentages of youth can't spell properly, read quickly, write legibly, or express themselves comprehensibly.

Out of the great morass--the American "Leveling" Philosophy, the equating of equal opportunity with "sameness"--came Herschell Podge. His teachers were underpaid, and his school turned most of its limited funds into a complex hierarchy of extra-curricular activities, the financing of a football team and rereleased motion picture entertainment for lunch period ennui. If Herschell were a colored boy, he wouldn't get decent school facilities in a good many sections of the South. If Herschell came from a Plains state, his high school probably couldn't offer a course in physics.

Counsellor as Savior

Herschell's one chance of redemption would be a trained counsellor, able to recognize talent and intelligence, and equipped to help him get the courses needed, find the stimulation to work outside of his school's limitations, and apply to the right college. But good counselling costs too much money. An American Sunday Supplement estimates that only one out of three U.S. high schools has an adequate counselling program. The closest thing to a counsellor in most high schools is the unholy combination of college sociology major and boys' dean--where guidance gets confused with discipline.

Thus Herschell, and most of America's gifted children--in order to survive in high school communities where the premium is put on social acceptance--and the scholar is only compensating for his big feet or his bad looks-generally adjust to that norm. The very educational system entrusted with the responsibility to train Herschell Podge and his fel- lows too often succeeds in converting intellectual interest into dance committees, campus clean up campaigns, school legislatures, and high school fraternities. Herschell is wasted.

II. Suggested Solutions

"For too long," commented a California school board member, "education has addressed itself to the needs of the backward student. It is time we paid the same care to our bright children. If we gear ourselves to the dull and the most backward, what we produce is mediocre at best."

Conformity: Neglect

The most urgent fact of American education today is not our schools' neglect of Herschell Podge, but our society's need for him. The tragedy of the gifted child is no longer individual and personal, it implies the critical tragedy of American society itself, for if Herschell Podge is not available to sustain and improve us, the only ones left to do the job will be the midgets of conformity who applied the stigma to his intelligence.

The National Education Association, strident P.T.A. chapters throughout the nation, school boards, and educational theorists hiding in our universities, have elaborate programs for action. Unfortunately, the ghost of "progressive education" haunts any program of experiment. The failure of total student freedom in the classroom, the neglect of basic skills for intellectual meandering,--those character defects of modern education which have come to be associated with "progressive education" have engendered in the minds of parents and the press an idea that education must return to the little red school house, the three R's, and the straightlaced New England discipline. Weekly, Time, the Saturday Evening Post and many other national magazines provide a forum for an older generation to call for the standards of "the old days."

Down with Levellers

A return, however, is not enough. There must be a full-scale reevaluation of the Levelling Philosophy. For the benefit of all students, we can institute course requirements in language, mathematics, and science--and provide for advanced work in literature and history. If the grammar school has not taught its charges the fundamentals of reading writing, and spelling, the secondary school should not compound the folly and bequeathe colleges a simple-sentence, monosyllabic thinker.

They Are Special

But for Herschell and the gifted children even this is not sufficient. The most obvious answer to their need may be derived from the words of the school board member quoted above. The gifted child must receive special attention. There must be special, advanced level classes in English and social studies, science, and mathematics. "Segregation" on the basis of intellect and ability--contrary to the charge of "undemocratic"--is in the best interests and tradition of a democracy in seeking out its best and training them. Bright students should be classed with bright students for stimulation and competition, instead of subjected to the frequent resentment of their slower classmates.

High schools in New York, New England, and California have embarked on elaborate programs along this line. It is significant that these are the states, according to U.S. News and World Report, which produce the best qualified students for college.

Financed Experiments

Experimentation with "segregated" classes on the basis of ability is the urgent need of every school where bright children must mark time and rehear explanations they understood at once repeated a fifth time for the classroom dullard. This experimentation should be given a fair chance--unlike faint-hearted programs poorly endowed and incapably administered in one school district for one school year, and then abandoned. Experimentation, and change, are not bad per se.

In Los Angeles Country, experimental programs in world problems, both economic and social, were abandoned in face of criticisms from such diverse groups as the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the press, and the Gerald L. K. Smith Christian Nationalists. A trial course combining science and sociology in a New York school, for advanced students, was dropped after a single year--despite the enthusiasm of both instructors and students.

Advanced students may be readily determined on the basis of reading comprehension and special skills--determined by simple, inexpensive, and easily available standardized tests formulated by major American universities. This is our best hope.

Better Counselling

Second, school districts can and should embark upon adequate counselling programs, using as models some high schools in Westchester Country, N.Y., or Long Beach, Cal.--where comprehensive counselling programs have for years encouraged special interests and solved the particular problems of students with high intelligence and unique talents.

Third, the issue of better teaching can be met head-on. In spotted school districts throughout the nation, a high school teacher is required to have a Master's Degree. While a step in the right direction of qualified instructors, such a stipulation ignores the more basic problems. Immediate among these, is the low pay of teachers.

Higher Pay

Not only is teaching among the three lowest paid professions in the United States (bedfellowing with journalists and clergymen), but the pay scale is antiquated and detrimental. Teacher's salaries still increase on the basis of years of service, not talent, initiative, or accomplishment. In every industry or business concern anywhere in the nation, talented and hard-working people are rewarded on the basis of their initiative, not their tenure. Only teaching maintains this deadening idiosyncrasy.

Teachers' colleges are, by and large, farcical diploma mills churning out second-rate instructors on a conveyer belt of picayune courses--motion picture camera projection, physical education, fingerpainting. And because their facade is so widely realized, they attract primarily the aimless high school graduate with no particular talents and less interest in any profession. Staffed and stocked by this brand of mediocrity, education will continue to devolve.

The question of funds for school improvement and teachers' pay must be met now, and if states and individual school districts and school bonds are unable to provide the necessary financial resources, a comprehensive aid program will have to go into effect.

Such improvements are not long-range hypothesizing, nor mere suggestions in a tolerable situation. Each is an urgent requirement if our society is best to serve itself and its members, not to mention maintaining or improving its status in the Cold War. If administrators and school officials fail to act in meeting what may be properly termed a crisis--for more than the gifted child--then it is up to parents and citizens of the community to fill in. The nation's press has recorded events in Lakewood, Ohio, where parents launched after-hours special classes in language and science when the school board failed to provide them.

The Need for Utopia

It was the oft-stated and much-trumpeted hope of the Enlightenment and three centuries of liberal thought that education was the key to Utopia. As one by one the other panaceas have proved to be illusions--from Marxian economics to social engineering, our high school system should not midwife despair of ever reaching such a goal.Fred Safier '60 received nation-wide publicity when he entered Harvard at the age of twelve. His method of escaping the usual secondary school curriculum is not open to most of the nation's gifted.